Gevlon: Don't help dumb people because I have absolutely no evidence that they cannot be helped. (My interpretation)

Klepsacovic

For the most part, M&S are made, not born or chosen. Read up on child development and the role of proper nutrition and early education. A capable child may be born, but in an unstimulating environment, their mind won't develop; they will grow up stupid, by no or fault of their own, but only by the environment. If there was more support for poor children, they'd be less stupid. Your antisocial tendencies actually create more M&S rather than reducing them.

Gevlon

and how would you give more support to poor children? Children cannot trade. You can only give to their parents who will spend it on smoke and booze.

Is he really this stupid? Where the fuck does he even get the idea "children can't trade"? It's completely irrelevant. And the smokes and booze, seriously, that's... that's just the sort of retarded lazy stereotype that a moron would use.

Children do not need to 'trade' or own or be directly given any money. Instead there can be these things called 'schools' in which children are 'taught' and unless the parents somehow know how to extract knowledge from their brains and sell it for crack, the 'school' won't be used to buy the parents drugs. Furthermore, at these 'schools' the children can be given lunch and dinner, which will be digested while they are there, meaning that unless their parents steal their blood, the children are the only ones getting the food.

There are ways to help children without helping terrible parents. Unfortunately, some people are so busy hating the world that they lack the free mental resources to think of these. Like I said, free public education and free lunch and breakfast for sufficiently poor children. Or public libraries where children can go to learn as much as they want. These were really fucking obvious.

Of course no system or solution is perfect. There will be some kids for whom school is a waste. In an ideal world they would be sent somewhere else to kill each other and smoke crack as they wish. Unfortunately that's not legal. Schooling them will be a waste, but waste is inevitable in any system.

It is unjust to reject all children who lack the ability to pay for their own schooling (by that I mean, whose parents are too poor to pay for it) simply because a significant portion will be wasted. To use a minority of moronic children to justify the abandonment of the majority is little different than the indiscriminate killing of civilians practiced by terrorists. It is the bedrock of civilization to not punish the innocent for the crimes of the guilty.

Furthermore, it is harmful to have large uneducated populations. Without education, they are more prone to violence and social unrest. How so? School isn't just about geometry and history; it's also a place where people are taught to follow rules, to respect authority, to be civilized. It serves no one to have large populations with little hope of employment and no respect for rules (including rule of law). That is an easy recruitment center for enemies of civilization; criminals, foreign enemies, terrorists, whoever.

I'm not saying we need to be nice or the stupid people will attack us. If that was the case I'd just say to shoot them while we have the element of surprise.

What I am saying is that we should not reject the upcoming generations purely because their parents lacked the means to educate and develop them. To do so is actively encouraging the growth of a worthless, unruly population. No one benefits when the world turns into Brazil: massive ghettos of uneducated idiots surrounding tiny enclaves of the inherited rich. Of course we also should not be France, whose excessive government support has discouraged employment, which impairs the social integration of Muslim immigrants, fueling discontent. The middle is almost always better than the extremes.

Some days I think Gevlon is just selfish and lacks empathy. Other days he appears to be incapable of anything approaching rational thought or seeing the possibility that he is wrong.

His title should have given it away: "Challenge for social(ist)s"He somehow has the ridiculous idea that social people; those who acre about their fellow human beings, are the slightest bit interchangeable with socialists. Obviously there would be some link between caring about other people and an economic system of government ownership for a collective good. But socials are far more likely to not work through government, but on their own. It's called charity. Socials don't demand that the government take over industry. They give money to charities and volunteer and take an active role.

As I think about this more, I can only conclude that Gevlon's grasp of English is so poor that he does not realize that social and socialist are not synonyms, and despite sharing a root (social), they do not share the entirety of their meaning. Or, he's only reaching logical conclusions given his initial assumption: Everyone else is so incredibly stupid, they can barely breath without government subsidies for air. When you start from that, it's not hard to see how he could reach all sorts of conclusions which would seem ridiculous if you started with more reasonable assumptions such as assuming that reality exists and is not merely an illusion created by aliens.

It's so easy to be angry and point out the flawed thinking of fools. I shouldn't be so lazy.

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It sometimes seems to me that Gevlon has come up with the ultimate trolling technique:

1. Start your own blog so you can't be banned for trolling;2. Threaten to delete comments that disagree with you on the grounds that they are trolling;3. Don't allow yourself to be constrained by tedious conventions like supplying evidence for your grand assertions or even agreeing with your own earlier posts.

My main blog is non-WoW and focuses on science and politics among other things, and I run in circles that would generally be described as libertarian.

Speaking of social dynamics, Gevlon is a bad parody of the folks I'm usually used to arguing or discussing with. He gets as much attention as he does because he puts it all through a lens of a gaming culture that's normally not particularly political- and therefore no is used to his particular brand of argument and assertion.

He's not a patch on, say, Billy Beck. Now there's an obnoxious troll that actually DOES deserve credit for often having sound points and a coherent philosophy.

"...Or public libraries where children can go to learn as much as they want"

Your socialist tendencies slip throught again, mr. socialist.

The PIAA (Publishing Industry Association of America) has been pursuing the people who use public libraries for some years now. They're reading books for FREE, depriving the publishing industry (...er, and the book's authors too, of course) of deserved royalties.

Currently, the successfull conviction of kids (and their mothers) caught reading books for FREE are currently charged $80,000 per book read (which is the estimated cost to the industry per book read for FREE).

Speak to Gevlon about this, and he will explain to you how this is just and fair. I recommend his video blog, where he uses his trusty blackboard. He will explain that if kids really want to read, they can go out and BUY the books. If they don't have the money... well, they can just GET A JOB grinding at McDonalds or some janitorial work. The jobs are there, M&S's just refuse to do it.

Stop facepalming. If you disagree, you're clearly a socialist who HATES goblins like Gevlon because he's rich. He has SO MUCH WEALTH (through hard work and intellectualism), that clearly anyone who disagrees with his philosophy is jealous. That's all. Just jealous. Of his wealth. And you want to take it from him via taxes and forced altruism.

...oh yes, I almost forgot. Don't forget to join Gevlon in his invasion.

He's assembling a coalition to invade a server that has never harmed him or his people personally. There's a reason why he's doing this (some sort of altruism, helping the poor downtrodden people of the server), but it will also bring him and his allies economic benefits (through AH trade), making him and his coalition Goblin partners LOTS OF MONEY... but that's just an unexpected coincidence, of course.

@LabRat: An video game elitist outside of a video game. Classic.Billy Beck? I know of only one Beck troll and he's only consistent within a given paymaster.

@Anonymous: I have to be honest, I'm not sure which way to respond to this. You seemed serious for a moment, but then intentionally absurd, and then I got all serious and wanted to point out how libraries and Napster aren't quite the same. Did I just date myself?

BTW, you're doing it wrong; he doesn't claim altruism until afterwards. Before the server planned to attack him.

@Stabs: I swear that's nearly a copy-paste of something you've said before. The ironic part is, that sort of environmentally-induced irrational behavior is exactly that of a moron who cannot adapt or rationally see the actual world beyond their isolated upbringing.

@Gevlon: Socials support each other. They don't need government bailouts. The banks were not run by socials, they were run by people of absolutely unrestricted greed.

Socialists are not necessarily interested in their fellow human beings. Instead they have historically been fervent nationalists who believe in a greater good beyond any individual good; to the point of having a 'greater good' which benefits no one. See: China or the USSR. Or to make it more accurate, they were not socialist for altruistic reasons, they were socialist for power reasons. If they had imagined the power of multi-national corporations back then; Chairman Mao might have instead been CEO Moa. In this context, socialism is not good or bad, but is merely a tool to be used by good or bad people.

I, as a social, and a bit of a socialist, instead believe in greater good when it benefits the individual. I'm not socialist to be nice, I'm socialist because it benefits me. I benefit when there are no people at rock bottom. Such people are harmful in a multitude of ways.

Klep: where I come from saying Beck's name is like saying "Candyman" or "Beetlejuice", but apparently his invocation does not extend to WoWblogs. Suffice to say he is a very articulate, absolutely dead serious about it anarchist, and not of the disaffected Che t-shirt wearing kind.

As to the conflation of "socialist" and "social"... between history, philosophy, political science, and biology, I'm just going to leave it as "the facepalm heard 'round the world".

nah gevlon is as broken as he think socials are. He lives in a fantasy world where every one is only impacted by thier own actions.

Society is by its very nature a social attempt to make the big scary world a better place. As far as the kid my father once said it best.

"you can pay to educate all those poor kids or you can pay to put them in prison" Of course it goes further than that. You pay for thier emergency room health care plans and all the other things that go with a hugely uneducated chunk of society.

The world Gevlon dreams of is Africa. Most of that contintent lives by his rules. He should go live there for a few years and see how he likes a world where being social is punished.